December 13, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

This week we’ve been: getting customer feedback for some major features we’re planning on launching in Q1; our San Francisco Holiday Party (Santa hats and photo booth posing for all!); retrospecting on 2013 and planning for 2014; and good old crunchy development. Check out our releases this week, and let me know what you think in the forums!

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates

PostgreSQL 9.3 in Early Access

We have released PostgreSQL 9.3 in early access! This new version of PostgreSQL has many new features including:

• Writeable foreign data wrappers (FDWs)
• Faster failover
• [Materialized views](http://michael.otacoo.com/postgresql-2/postgres-9-3-feature-highlight-materialized-views/)
• Parallel pg_dump to speed backups of large databases

If you have any questions on how to upgrade, or want our professional services team to do an upgrade for you, open a ticket and ask!

A new family of instances

AWS recently announced a new family of instances, the C3 class. AWS has given these new instances their highest performance processors, enhanced networking, and SSD-based instance storage. We have now added the ability for customers to use these with our platform! This feature is in early access so you will need to enable it in order to see the instances as an option when you are provisioning. These instances are being recommended by AWS for CPU-bound, scale out and compute intensive applications such as high traffic front-end application servers, batch processing, distributed analytics, or cluster computing applications.

(Please keep in mind that these new instances are in very high demand and may not be available as more are added to AWS datacenters.)

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Monday, December 16th: Come by the Dublin office for the second meeting of PyLadies Dublin! For more details, or to RSVP, check out the meetup page here.

Articles of Interest

Just in time for 2014 new year’s planning, a reminder that product strategy means you need to be really good at saying “Nope.”

The one and only Aphyr posted a popular blog that blends two of his favorite topics, Carly Rae Jepsen and distributed systems, “Call me maybe: Redis Redux.”